We Can Build You in Philip K Dick

Aug 08, 2012 Jack Stovold rated it really liked it

My Philip K. Dick Project

Entry #22 - We Can Build You (written Oct. 1962, published Jul. 1972)

We Can Build You is a slight book, especially after Dick’s masterpiece, The Man In The High Castle (#21), a tough act for anyone to follow. This quite bizarre little story follows Louis Rosen exclusively. Unlike High Castle, or the majority of his other novels, this is not a multiple perspectives story, it belongs to Rosen.
I liked the first half better than the second. One of my favorite Dick techniqu My Philip K. Dick Project

Entry #22 - We Can Build You (written Oct. 1962, published Jul. 1972)

We Can Build You is a slight book, especially after Dick’s masterpiece, The Man In The High Castle (#21), a tough act for anyone to follow. This quite bizarre little story follows Louis Rosen exclusively. Unlike High Castle, or the majority of his other novels, this is not a multiple perspectives story, it belongs to Rosen.
I liked the first half better than the second. One of my favorite Dick techniques is his mixing of the fantastic and mundane, and there are few better examples to be found than We Can Build You. Louis and his family (his philosophical and long-winded German father, prone to speaking in German) and his upside-down faced brother (Dick casually mentions a rash of radiation deformities following nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s), along with his partner Maury, sell electronic organs in the Pacific Northwest operating on the fringes of legality. But business isn’t going so well, so Maury forces them into a new business, that of recreating simulacra, or robotic recreations of historical figures perfect down to the last detail (think of the Hall of Presidents at Disneyland, but, you know, alive). The first to be built is the somewhat odd choice of Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war during most of the Civil War.
It’s also one of Dick’s funniest books, surprisingly. The humor begins when the Stanton simulacra (referred to thereafter in the book as The Stanton) is activated. The simulacra, it turns out, are essentially identical to their real-life counterparts. Stanton’s interactions with the group and out in the world are mined for all their humor, and it gets even better when their second simulacra, Abraham Lincoln (hereafter, The Lincoln) comes online. Stanton’s well-documented personal dislike of Lincoln provides plenty of comic fodder. Stanton bitches about Lincoln, and Lincoln himself (widely believed to have been manic-depressive), alternates between periods of moodiness and morose philosophizing, and boring everyone with bemused readings from stories such as Peter Pan which he discovers and finds enchanting. The absurd situations pile up as Samuel Barrows, a wealthy real estate magnate, enters the picture, with Louis and the group (including Stanton and Lincoln, who by this point, are members of the company as well) vacillating between doing business with Barrows or trying to avoid getting bought out by him. Barrows wants to use the technology to build fake people to fill up his real estate on the moon to entice real people to move in. In response Rosen and company hatch a plan to start their own simulacra babysitting service using recreations of civil war soldiers, and it gets even wackier from there.
All along though, Rosen is entranced by Maury’s “schizophrenic (schizophrenia assumes a wide variety of meanings in Dick’s works)” daughter, Pris, one of the main forces in bringing the simulacra to life. Pris is practically the very definition of the “crazy dark-haired Dick girl”, distilled to her very essence. Her verbal sparring with Rosen reminds me of a lot of the dialogue in some of Dick’s early realist novels, especially Mary and the Giant (#10). The twisted logic of these conversations would be enough to make any man tear their hair out, and Rosen knows he should stay away but he just can’t. The trouble begins when Pris leaves them for Barrows, taking their best simulacra technician with them, and becomes the girl on his arm in the public eye. This sends Rosen on a downward spiral which ends with him back in a mental hospital. Mental hospitals abound in the world of We Can Build You, and themes of sanity and schizophrenia have become frequent in Dick’s work.
This is where the book sort of goes off the rails. Although comical, We Can Build You was also dealing with serious and compelling philosophical issues of identity and spirituality, and it’s all sort of abandoned in the last third which dedicates itself completely to Rosen and his obsession with Pris. The book was really building to something in its themes of reality and human identity, but it’s lost in the shuffle which is sort of a disappointment. If you can handle this, then I really recommend this, for despite its shortcomings, it really is one of Dick’s funniest and most thought-provoking books.

Stray thoughts:

# My edition’s cover promised a robot Hitler! (And a Philip K. Dick robot) Where’s my robot Hitler? That’s just false advertising.

# Dick must have really had a thing for fried prawns. Everyone always wants to go for fried prawns. Shows up as much as Ganymede and Scotch.

# Dick never passes up an opportunity to sprinkle some German into his books, either.

My edition: Panther Books, paperback, 1986

Up next: “Gather Yourselves Together”! Finally, the book that rightly should have been #2 in this project! Let’s take a trip back in time to read Dick’s very first novel.

August 8th, 2012 ...more

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